Contagion, Culture & the Global South

Saurav Kumar Rai, "Literary Depictions of Contagion in Colonial North India."

There is a well-known axiom that “a single death is a tragedy, while a million deaths are statistics.” This observation holds particular relevance in the context of epidemics. Official records and archival data, though rich in quantitative detail, often fail to capture the socio-cultural and emotional dimensions of such crises. In this regard, literature becomes an indispensable source for reconstructing the social history of pandemics. It is within literary works that some of the most nuanced and enduring memories of epidemics have been preserved across generations. This paper seeks to examine select literary representations of contagion in colonial North India, particularly those that reflect the devastating impact of epidemics during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It engages with the writings of prominent Hindi litterateurs such as Munshi Premchand, Phanishwar Nath Renu, Pandey Bechan Sharma Ugra, Suryakant Tripathi Nirala, and Harishankar Parsai, among others, to explore how literature reflects as well as conserve the experiences of contagion and suffering.

Pallavi Das, "Rethinking Cholera in the Indian Ocean World: Transregional Networks and Epidemic Governance in the Nineteenth Century."

In 1991, David Arnold proposed the Indian Ocean as a “disease zone”, conceptualizing it as an epidemiological space shaped by the circulation of pathogens, medical knowledge, and healing practices. This influential idea encouraged extensive scholarship that foregrounded circulation and traced exchanges of diseases, drugs, and medical texts across the IOW. Cholera was central to this insight as its patterns of spread revealed a deeply interconnected epidemiological world. Yet three decades later, cholera historiography remains largely confined within regional or national frameworks. This limitation stems from a partial engagement with mobility, which emphasizes what circulated rather than how such connections reshaped everyday epidemic management in littoral societies. The paper argues that cholera in the Indian Ocean littoral must be understood through transregional networks grounded in local contexts, rather than national frameworks alone. Focusing on four British-influenced localities in the nineteenth-century Western Indian Ocean, it shows how cholera histories were both convergent and divergent, shaped by interconnected imperial and maritime networks.

Meenakshi Srihari, "Talking Microbes: Why Comics?"

From twentieth-century cartoons in Punch that cast microbes as social and political actors, to manga adaptations imagining the body as an autocratic regime of cellular labour, the microbe has a surprisingly long and charged history of visual representation. This talk traces that history to ask: what does the comics form uniquely offer to stories of contagion and infection that other narrative modes cannot?

In the wake of COVID-19 and amid the widening crisis of infectious disease, Graphic Medicine -- the depiction of health in comics -- has expanded dramatically in vision, scale, and aesthetic ambition. It has moved from capturing individual, embodied experiences of illness to rendering the microbial worlds that inhabit, circulate through, and exceed the human. Drawing on Susan Squier’s concept of “porous pathography,” this talk brings together multispecies and more-than-human frameworks, employing close reading as a “microscopic” tool to think through the scaling up of microbial lives in contemporary comics, and asking what it means to narrate at a “nonhuman scale.”

I situate Graphic Medicine within a longer cultural and visual history of the microbe, arguing for comics as a generative critical site for reimagining our entanglements with nonhuman microbial life.

Gaana Jayagopalan, "Viral Vernaculars: Mediating Contagion, Care, and Communication in the Global South."

Contagion does not travel through bodies alone. In the Global South, disease moves through algorithms, comment sections, and reaction videos in interesting ways, replicating and mutating peer-to-peer in ways that mirror, and often precede, its biological spread. In this working paper, I shall argue that the communicative logic of virality and the epidemiological logic of contagion are not merely analogous but structurally homologous, and that a digitally- connected public has learned (with remarkable ingenuity) to exploit that homology.

Drawing on cases from South Asia's digital health public sphere, this inaugural lecture proposes a new analytical category—the Viral Vernacular—and with it, a methodological provocation for Health Humanities. It asks what happens when we treat the algorithmic architectures of YouTube and other social media not as noise at the margins of medical knowledge, but as its primary infrastructure for millions? Who are the new epistemic gatekeepers this infrastructure produces? What forms of care do they enact, and at what cost? And when platforms erase the spaces where people made life-or-death health decisions, what does the field owe those invisible archives? 

The lecture turns to a signal case of viral confrontations between institutional scientists and practitioners of traditional and modern medicine on YouTube, to argue that these are not merely online disputes, but digital ruptures: moments in which the contest for medical authority becomes publicly legible in ways the clinic never permitted. What emerges from that rupture is something the History of Medicine has not perhaps theorised.